Pages

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Get Ready for Avengers - What Do You Need to Know?

Alright, so you’re a huge Disney fan, you’ve read this blog
for a while or wandered over because you’re interested in Disney films, and now
you are ready to take the plunge and check out Marvel’s Avengers, opening on
Friday. But hey, you’re a Disney fan,
not a comic book fan. Why did Disney buy
this property? What’s the story with
these super heroes? Fear not, dear
reader, I’m going to tell you everything you need to know to enjoy the movie. Ready?
Here it is:

That’s right, you don’t need to know anything about the
Avengers or to have seen the other Marvel films to enjoy this movie. Just buy your ticket, go to the theatre, and
enjoy. However, if you want to go a
little deeper, let me give you five things to check out so you can get ready
for the big day tomorrow.

The
Marvel films – Surely most of you have seen Iron Man by now, but what
about Thor? Or Captain America? If you haven’t seen the films, the next best thing is to listen to our
podcasts about them. Disney Film
Project did spoiler-filled podcasts about Iron Man 1 & 2, Captain America and
Thor. Check them out to get
ready. Also, if you want to go uber
geek, check out Newsarama’s annotations for the films, which detail all
the comic book connections from each film.

What
are these comic books of which you speak? So you’re not a comic book fan, but you
are considering trying to figure out what it’s all about so you can have a
better enjoyment of the film. Go
check out Marvel.com, but for the Avengers specifically, you should try a
trade paperback or collection. Some
key issues to check out would be Avengers #1 (available for FREE digitally), the Kree-Skrull War, or
Avengers Assemble Volume 1. All are
great introductions to the characters and feature Captain America,
Iron Man and Thor.

Where
else can I see the Avengers? Well,
if you like what you’ve seen so far in the films, give Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes the cartoon a try. It’s on Disney XD, so it’s still in the
family. This serialized cartoon
gets to the heart of the Avengers in a hurry, and has great introductions
to all the characters. If you don’t
catch it on Disney XD, it’s streaming on Netflix for the entire first
season.

How do
I catch up quickly? You plan to see
the movie tomorrow, but you just want to know the basics without having to
go through all of our podcasts or reading tons of articles. I’ll give you two options: buy the digital comic prelude to
Avengers – Fury’s Big Week and read that. It should take less than an hour, and
summarizes everything to this point. Or, here is the summary – there’s an all
powerful device called the Tesseract that a bad guy, Loki, wants to get
his hands on to rule the Earth. Stopping
him will take a collection of heroes, not just one.

Remember
what you need to know. Nothing. Even if you ignore all the stuff I just
mentioned, you can go to the movie and have a fantastic time.